AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB Review - Malta Gets Frame Rated

Sleeping Dogs

Welcome to Hong Kong, a vibrant neon city teeming with life, whose exotic locations and busy streets hide one of the most powerful and dangerous criminal organizations in the world: the Triads. In this open world game, you play the role of Wei Shen, an undercover cop trying to take down the Triads from the inside out. You'll have to prove yourself worthy as you fight your way up the organization, taking part in brutal criminal activities without blowing your cover. Torn between your loyalty to the badge and a criminal code of honor, you will risk everything as the lines between truth, loyalty and justice become permanently blurred

Our settings for Sleeping Dogs

In our first graph, both the HD 7970s and the HD 7990 appear to have significant advantages over of the GTX 690 and the GTX Titan even at 1920x1080 with Sleeping Dogs, but our observed frame rates tell a different story - one of runt frames and mis-reported frame rates.

Wow, clearly something is amiss here! The black and orange lines, if you can call them that, are heavily alternating between short and long frame times while both the GTX 690 and Titan are running tighter, more consistent numbers.

As a result, the average frame rates over the entire run show the GTX 690 to be the best option, pulling about 78 FPS with the Titan at 60 FPS.

You can see in our frame variance data how all of those runts look from a different angle. The Radeon HD 7990 adds as much as 10 ms of variance to frames while the the GTX 690 barely crosses the 2 ms mark.

The same kind of pattern is seen at 2560x1440, with the HD 7990 and the HD 7970s in CrossFire dropping once we remove the runt frames from the picture.

The bands of the HD 7990 and HD 7970s in CrossFire frame times are actually even worse at this resolution yet the NVIDIA GeForce options are able to maintain very thin lines of times.

As a result, the average frame rate (seen at the 50th percentile or so) is much higher with the GTX 690 than the HD 7970s in CrossFire and HD 7990.

Clearly the amount of back and forth seen in the frames displayed on the screen with the two CrossFire solutions are producing a less fluid animation and thus we can't recommend them to players of Sleeping Dogs.

Sorry, one last time - no solid results from the HD 7990 in our 5760x1080 testing due to alternating dropped frames from the Eyefinity + CrossFire combination so we'll move on to some more tests and closing thoughts.

FPS won't mean everything anymore as soon as amd has a single feature like PhysX or TXAA that nVidia does not - then we will hear how IT MATTERS and is of utmost import, and definitely makes the purchasing decision for everyone...

I can hardly wait... since AMD is about 5 or 6 massive features behind nVidia, and all those of course do not matter at all, only fps, which as we all now must admit instead of just me saying it for years, amd FAILS AT cf FPS.

Man I tell you, I am so, so sick of it, I have been so sick of it for so long, for so many years, and now finally, I bask IN THE HOLY GLORY OF THE TRUTH ! AMD SUCKS VERY BADLY !

I told you all so for years, while I got kicked and stomped with lies and fanboy emotes gone wild, man is it ever good to be totally freaking vindicated.

I will add, no thanks and a pox on all you amd wackadoos that screamed for years about your amd loser cards. I have recieved zero apologies from all of you, and in fact, have seen EXACTLY ZERO APOLOGIES ON THE WEB FROM ANY OF THEM ! SITE OWNERS, AND ALL THE POSTERS !

This testing methodology is deliberately created to make Nvidia look good.
I watch other reviews and the frame times don't look that bad.
Here Nvidia looks great and AMD look very bad. Plus a saw reviews where average and minimal fps are quite tight.
Others also used the
AMD Catalyst Frame_Pacing_Prototype v2 For Radeon HD 7990

and it showed nice reduction of frame latency. In time it can only get better

Testing methodology isn't deliberately created to make Nvidia look good, it was to show the issues associated with dual GPU.

The only reason NVidia cooperated was that they knew they had the issue fixed where as AMD ignored it for some time.

If Nvidia still had the issue, they would never participate in developing this testing methodology.

Luckily this method of not looking at FPS (started up by TechReport site) opened our eyes to something we have seen for some time but simply accepted it. And it Forced AMD to actually do something about it. And I have to say, they did an amazing job on it.

The result is the same, though their definition of a runt frame is far more forgiving (less than 2% of the screen, or 20 lines worth). However, they added objective testing at the end, with several different people taking blind tests. All of them found the 690 was smoother.

I love your site, podcasts, and reviews. I cannot for the life of me figure out why you have once again railroaded AMD without trying any of the publicly available solutions to fix your issues? Can you at least acknowledge that Radeon Pro exists? I understand it is a third party program, but we are PC gamers, we tweak things, is it really that far of a stretch to imagine that in the real world we take advantage of Radeon Pro? I sometimes spend hours tweaking game settings before I actually start playing the game, I am sure most of your readers do the same, why do you continue to ignore the obvious?

For this review I didn't put a high focus on the RadeonPro solution because I knew and was playing with the prototype drivers from AMD - that is the REAL solution. I will still tryout RadeonPro eventually but that is just a hack or patch job in reality.

RadeonPro fixes the problem by limiting FPS. However, it has at least a couple draw backs you will see noted by different people.

1) It does lower your average FPS to work.
2) If a game has different average fps in different areas, you have to lower it to the worst case, lower FPS even more (skyrim users have to limit FPS for outdoors, even though indoors has much higher FPS)

Maybe I just dont get or see it.... I had 7950 crossfire and picked up a GTX 690 somewhat cheap on Ebay and got frustrated very quickly when I couldn't get it to work as well as what I had. Tomb Raider was brutal if I turned on the hair and Bioshock took a lot of tweaking to get me where I was with the 7950's. Just sold the 690 (little profit bonus) and ordered a couple of Vapor X 7970's....

Tomb Raider had problems with the 314 drivers on Nvidia, the drivers that were current on release. Going back to 310 make it run great. I believe the most recent 314.22 drivers fixed the issue as well. Bioshock infinite is having troubles with both cards.

Hey Ryan i just wanted to say congratulation on the 10k mark you and your team truly deserve it. And don't let these trolls influence you man you're doing an amazing job. You write it we read it. Im going to contribute $10 this weekend.

Hello
Thank you very much, Mr. Ryan I've been following your site and all of your articles for quite some time
And I'm very interested in the modern way to test the Graphics Accelerator
I need your consultation in some of the things in this regard
Hopes provide me with your Email
Thank you very much again
And continued the wonderful effort

I hope AMD can give our memories of ATi new life, and you people are, in large part, that motivation. AMD could not buy a better format to motivate its people, which brings a little excitement to see how AMD will strive to win and make the community a better place.

I've read another review (on tom's hardware) about 7990's performance, FCAT, prototype driver, etc, basically the same thing, although there was something i noticed.
In their benchmarks the hardware (FRAPS) FPS was also quite bigger for the prototype d. compared to the basic catalyst 7990. While for the observable FPS this difference is easy understandable, i found no explanation for the extra FPS.
Prototype driver just "arranges" the frames in a smoother way, but why it appears to produce more frames?

Just installed the 7990 last night and went straight to BF3...frame rates SUCKED!! I had a GTX 570 and it's rates were WAY faster. How do I resolve this problem? How do I get the card to work as expected? How do I get good frame rates with this card? What am I doing wrong. I want to run BF3 on ULTRA settings and enjoy all the "eye-candy" that comes with a high-end card like the 7990. PLEASE HELP!!